The 24th Chromosome, Part 2

Starting tomorrow, I am going to give you some of the physical characteristics of Aason and Lupe Beirak. As mentioned in yesterday's post, the world of Rome's Revolution, the 24th chromosome plays a huge role in shaping the Vuduri, the future of mankind. This is the rest of the entry from my Wiki on the 24th chromosome.

Other effects of the 24th chromosome were improved resistance to infection and rapid healing. But beyond the ability to communicate telepathically, the most striking change were to the eyes. The Vuduri developed a second, internal, iris which served almost as "built-in sunglasses" that reacted instantaneously to too much light. The retina developed iRods which could detect infrared and uCones which could see into the ultraviolet. Also, the retina became reflective, essentially a mirror. A second, tiny mirror developed right in the middle of the pupil creating, in effect, a telescope using Maksutov-Cassegrain optics. A side-effect of having a reflective retina, called a tapetum (like that of a cat) was the eyes of a Vuduri would appear to glow, even in dim lighting.

Another, rarely discussed change was that the Vuduri do not have hair below their eyeballs eliminating the need to ever shave!

Unfortunately, there was one other change, more profound, that was designed to be recessive. In other words, its effects would not be seen initially and would only occur when the proper pair of Vuduri mated. Once this genotype expressed itself as a phenotype, the eyes of the person changed. They became very dark, almost black. But the internal changes were far worse. This last change caused either half the brain or later the entire brain to develop, not as a human brain, but as a computing engine built of the biological equivalent of memrons.

These people, known as the Onsiras, were essentially human robots that reported to MASAL. It was his long-term plan to convert all of mankind into these living machines, under his control.

The change did not occur as quickly as MASAL would have liked and he became impatient. He precipitated the Robot War and decimated the population, preserving those individuals most likely to give birth to Onsiras and eliminating those least likely. The mandasurte were particularly vexing since they would never evolve into an Onsira so MASAL established the prison world of Deucado to clandestinely kidnap and imprison them and ultimately eliminate them.